Digital Marketing in the Cloud

In previous posts, we’ve introduced the overall concept of the Digital Enterprise, characteristics of today’s digital businesses, key challenges that many companies face when adopting a cloud strategy and the steps that these organizations can take to help speed their transition to the public cloud.

Our recent white paper, “The Digital Enterprise: Transforming Business in the Cloud”, defines digital businesses as companies with 100% digital IT and business processes that, for the most part and as much as possible, are hosted in the public cloud. Additional characteristics of a digital enterprise include:

The ability to easily scale computing resources and advanced features in order to meet demand.

Faster time-to-market when launching new services, websites and web applications in support of business initiatives and market changes.

The ability to innovate, , fail, and repeat at speeds that far exceed those of their competitors that still maintain traditional, workload management solutions.

Management of systems is unified in the public cloud via a single management interface, which eliminates the complexities of multiple management systems and delivers higher cross-application reliability.

Ease-of-interoperability due to open architecture that supports multiple software and hardware technologies.

The focus of the IT department becomes innovation rather than required maintenance.

Companies like Coca-Cola and Yamaha have already begun their transformation to becoming Digital Enterprises by migrating critical applications and workloads to the public cloud. Core workloads and applications include short term, large scale batch computing and data analysis workloads, on-premises business applications (ERP systems, marketing, collaboration, sales, and accounting tools), application and development environments and applications which are built to be inherently “cloud” or “cloud native”.

As companies seek to streamline their core workloads and applications through digital migration, they quickly realize that central IT isn’t the only department that can benefit from the use of cloud technology. It’s no surprise that with today’s digital culture (and our need for instant gratification and expectations for wicked-fast responses, feedback and communication), marketing is a key sector that stands to benefit drastically from the capabilities of the cloud. Specifically, the drastic change in the ways in which enterprises can now reach and engage their audience and furthermore, scale globally to support thousands of websites and web apps as well as store, analyze and distribute mission-critical data, efficiently and securely.

I began my career as a high tech marketer more than a decade ago and have had the privilege of working for some of the biggest names in the industry. It all began at PeopleSoft as a Direct Response Campaign Manager, driving direct mail campaigns for the ERP powerhouse. Over the last fourteen years, my role as a marketer has transformed along with the methodologies that have emerged, changing the game as we know it.

It wasn’t much more than a decade ago that traditional “snail mail” was the norm for getting your business’ messaging into market and a standard campaign was a bit of a mathematical equation that resembled something like this:

The result? A sluggish response to market changes and data capture/analysis was manual (at best) and provided very little insight into campaign performance and ROI when compared to today’s digital marketing capabilities. The good news, however, was that competition followed the same methodologies and invested in the traditional, tried and true mediums of marketing and advertising.

I still remember the day that I launched my first, purely digital, email campaign. Within minutes we began seeing audience responses trickle in, and in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but think, “Whoa! Game changer!” It wasn’t long before newer methods of digital marketing emerged and traditional direct mail became a dinosaur on the verge of extinction.

Today, investments in digital marketing are a key component to a digital enterprise’s competitive advantage. The convergence of technology and marketing has never before been so tightly coupled, thus having a profound impact on overall marketing strategies. In fact, a 2013 U.S. Digital Marketing Spending Survey by Gartner reports that two-thirds of marketers have a capital expenditure budget that they are using to acquire marketing software licenses and infrastructure.

Marketers are looking for an easier, lower cost way to get the capacity they need to develop digital marketing campaigns when and where they need it.

Delivering engaging experiences requires real time, high performing architectures that provide marketers the ability to measure and improve the performance of their websites or campaigns and tie them more closely to overall corporate goals. The insights garnered from the massive amounts of data collected can then be used to dynamically adjust creative execution or content for optimal performance.

The secret to success when shifting your digital marketing efforts to the public cloud is to enable digital operations that drive real-time action plans to better serve your customers. Additionally, it is important to recognize that digital marketing campaign management isn’t the only area where digital enterprises are reaping the benefits of the public cloud.

Over the next few weeks, we will explore how businesses like Adobe, DVF and Magento are benefiting from an increased flexibility and agility to quickly respond to changes in the marketplace and scale their marketing operations globally—at a much lower cost than traditional methods—by running the following digital marketing efforts in the public cloud:

Websites & Web Applications

eCommerce

Dev & Test Environments

Content Delivery

In today’s world, consumer habits change fast and marketing decisions need to be made within seconds, not days. Shifting your marketing operations to the public cloud enables you to deliver marketing content and campaigns with the levels of availability, performance, and personalization that your customers expect while lowering your costs and driving preferred business outcomes.